WELLESLEY, June 23: Global urbanisation is swelling cities around the world, with more than 70 percent of the world’s population already living in urban areas. BCC Research reveals in its new report that information and communication technologies (ICT) will play a vital role in how cities become smarter in sustaining quality of life without upsetting the ecological balance. The global market for smart city technologies will grow from $212.3 billion in 2013 to $668.5 billion in 2019, reflecting a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.9 percent. North America, the largest market, is anticipated to reach $218.3 billion in 2019, with a 16.1 percent CAGR. Europe, the region with the highest projected growth rate at 23.1 percent CAGR, will reach $197.7 billion by 2019. The major cities in the world have transformed into massive cosmopolitan regions with considerable cultural diversity. The growing awareness of our fragile ecology and the evolving environmental compliances and regulations have made it difficult to govern these large cities. Key driving forces for the smart cities market include the increasing rate of migration from rural areas into new urban areas coupled with the expanding global population and the demand for a sustainable infrastructure. Smart cities make extensive use of communication technologies to improve the quality of life of their citizens. As environmental regulations have become stricter, there has been an increase in “green” solutions and technologies that has fueled the growth in the smart cities sector. A number of factors hindering adoption of smart city solutions: scaling of newer technologies is unproven; technology challenges the status quo in how cities are run; and technology is not well understood across several city sectors. However, the main barrier to adopting such solutions is the complexity in how cities are operated, financed, regulated and planned. “Current research shows that the necessary heavy funding and capital expenditures will exert a huge restraint on the smart cities market. Various socio-economic and political factors also pose risks for the development of smart cities,” says BCC Research Analyst Miguel Pimentel. “The differences in the social strata and political agendas pose risks in the evolving smart cities projects, and so the current research aims to facilitate the compression on how the market works.”